In this thesis, we argue that there are two subtypes of exclamative clauses in Quebec French. Based on the Speech Act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Searle & Vanderveken, 1985) and the Clause Type theory (Sadock & Zwicky, 1985; Reis, 1999), our analysis is concerned with a set of seemingly synonymous exclamative constructions respectively marked by the exclamative morphemes -tu, donc, and assez (1).
(1) Elle est-tu/donc/assez belle!
'Isn't she pretty!/She's so pretty!'
We show that despite the fact that exclamative constructions with -tu, donc, and assez all meet the criteria for the exclamative clause type given by Zanuttini and Portner (2003) (factivity, evaluativity/scalar implicature, expressivity/speaker orientedness and inability to appear in question/answer pairs), exclamative speech acts performed by uttering exclamative constructions with -tu/donc have different felicity conditions than exclamative speech acts performed by uttering exclamative constructions with assez. For an exclamative construction with -tu/donc to be uttered felicitously, the hearer must be in a specific epistemic state: she must be able to corroborate the judgment expressed by the speaker. Exclamative constructions with assez are not subject to such a constraint. We show that this pragmatic distinction can be correlated with syntactic and semantic distinctions and conclude that there are, indeed, two subtypes of exclamative clauses in Quebec French. Our research thus opens new empirical and theoretical perspectives for the description and analysis of the grammar of speech acts.